The latest State of Email Service Providers (ESP) report from Litmus contains some really interesting insights. Not least the continued acceptance of Mailchimp as a serious ESP.
Until relatively recently, Mailchimp was the cheap and cheerful alternative to professional email solutions such as Upland Adestra and dotdigital, loved by users and community organisations who wanted a simple, user-friendly way of sending professional-looking emails. In recent years, however, it has challenged high-end platforms to become the go-to solution for many businesses.
In the Litmus report, Mailchimp is now the top ESP in the UK and Europe, the most common solution for organisations with a list of fewer than 100,000 active subscribers, and the most used platform for non-profits.
One of the reasons for the platform’s continued growth is its simplicity. It doesn’t attempt to do everything, but what it does – allowing users to create effective email campaigns quickly and easily – it does very well. While the automation, personalisation, integration and optimisation allowed by HubSpot, Salesforce, Campaign Monitor and Marketo are superior, for a growing number of organisations, Mailchimp is now the best and most cost-effective ESP solution on the market.
This is reflected in the platform’s steady year-on-year growth, with a user base of 14 million in 2020 (a 15% increase on the previous year) responsible for sending over 333 billion individual emails.
Under the hood, however, the functionality that Mailchimp offers has increased dramatically in recent years, connecting seamlessly with hundreds of different platforms to provide the flexibility and integrations that all marketing and communications teams are focusing on.
The platform also took the unusual step of buying a print magazine, Courier, in 2020. The London-based business title has long been a favourite in the Think office, telling interesting, modern business stories, and the acquisition points towards Mailchimp’s ongoing transformation from an ESP to an integrated marketing platform.
You can read about Mailchimp’s growth from side project to its multimillion user base in this article in Inc. from 2018.
